Friday, 22 April 2011

An Open Letter To Xbox Live Arcade

To the people in charge of the Xbox Live Arcade service, specifically whoever decided on the transaction specifics for the Indie Games section:

Why, why, WHY do I have to always have an online connection to play Indie Games? Especially ones that have no online functionality, beyond a leaderboard for comparing how long it took you to beat.
Why aren't the licensed games of yesteryear that I've purchased on XBLA the same way? Why is it that I can play Sonic Adventure offline, but not Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes? Is it because Sega, a company who still makes big-production video games that cost $60 for you guys made the first one? Are you trying to offset costs of keeping the Indie section up by forcing people to get XBLA cards?

I mean, one might question why someone would want to play a game offline, when the only way you can purchase that game in the first place is if you're online. Maybe I have a temporary XBLA account, and my "true" account is offline. I mean, what do you guys care where I play this stuff? You've already got my money, and it's not like the developer will lose profits unless I have to get pop-up notifications that my friends are playing Halo every 5 seconds.

Also, you may not have heard of them, but there are these things called power-outages or server troubles or having to deal with a shitty, overpriced ISP. These things happen. Fiber optic cables can be destroyed by an old lady with a trowel without even trying.

If any of these things happen while I am playing Alpha Squad, I am effectively kicked out of the thing I by which I mean my relatives at Christmas and birthdays because I am a sponge payed good money for. This can't be toward fighting piracy, because I don't think pirates give a shit about these things compared to Mega Man 9, which doesn't suffer from this problem because it's not an Indie game by a developer named George.

And to think, Nintendo used to be the one who didn't understand or care about the concept of an online marketplace. Or "Garage-developers".